It's funny you say that, I've seen people pick a tech stack based on developer cost.
Maybe five years back I had a client in NYC who had a predominantly Java stack, but due to internal politics, wouldn't pay more than 135k for a senior developer when the market was wanting at least 25-30k more than that. Everyone they hired was pretty terrible.
At the time, Node developers were cheaper, so we split the application in two, wrapped all the old Java code with APIs, which was then able to be maintained by a small team while the front-end and any new features were all re-written with Node. It was architectural a better system--but the driving factor was really developer cost (the business hated to make any investments in technology).
The problem was that Node got popular and it got harder and harder to hire good Node developers at what the company wanted to pay. They had a big re-org and fired everyone I knew, so I don't know what they are doing now, but I often wonder if they just repeated the process with whatever up-and-coming language was more hip.
> I've seen people pick a tech stack based on developer cost
You'd be surprised how often cost of developers comes into the overall conversation especially when you have tech sprawl and have to spend to get qualified people.
I've seen projects green-light just on the premise that removing legacy code will lead to a payroll reduction.
Maybe five years back I had a client in NYC who had a predominantly Java stack, but due to internal politics, wouldn't pay more than 135k for a senior developer when the market was wanting at least 25-30k more than that. Everyone they hired was pretty terrible.
At the time, Node developers were cheaper, so we split the application in two, wrapped all the old Java code with APIs, which was then able to be maintained by a small team while the front-end and any new features were all re-written with Node. It was architectural a better system--but the driving factor was really developer cost (the business hated to make any investments in technology).
The problem was that Node got popular and it got harder and harder to hire good Node developers at what the company wanted to pay. They had a big re-org and fired everyone I knew, so I don't know what they are doing now, but I often wonder if they just repeated the process with whatever up-and-coming language was more hip.